Podcasts

I hear voices... talking about football

Aaron Schatz on RotoUnderworld Radio

Hey, it's time for another preseason podcast! I'm on here with Matt Kelley on RotoUnderworld's Sonic Truth podcast. We're talking about the imbalance between the NFC and AFC, judging Jimmy Garoppolo despite small sample size, and why FO expects Indianapolis and Dallas to be better than conventional wisdom.

i enjoy Mansion's stuff when slogging through work, but i'm not surprised at the reaction here. there's a major culture clash between what Schatz represents & what Mansion represents, and frankly i never expected this particular podcast to happen.

i view FO as the second wave of football analytics (first wave being Bud Goode), and Mansion is one of many i view as part of the third wave. said "third wave" is largely a bunch of former poker pros, other professional gamblers, & white-collar types who got into football analysis through fantasy football; DFS in particular was what drew a lot of them into the hardcore side of it, and a lot of fantasy pundits expanded more into real-football analytics over time. Twitter is the main hub for this particular community, as opposed to message boards like this one. some bigger names i'd consider part of this group include Evan Silva, Chris Raybon, & JJ Zachariason. Mansion is definitely the most, er, *divisive* personality among this crowd, FWIW.

here's an example of the divide between these communities: a couple years back or so, i recall a staff member here saying he'd never heard of Christine Michael. among both Fantasy Twitter & Scouting Twitter, on the other hand, Christine Michael had been a neverending debate topic for YEARS. his all-time-great Combine performance led people to believe in him and tout him as a fantasy sleeper for ages, while others were never sold because of his poor college production. the zeal of his supporters was so ridiculous that it singlehandedly made the term "truther" part of the Football Twitter lexicon. i was just shocked that somebody who works in football analytics had never even caught a faint whiff of this.

there's a significant age gap between these groups overall, and philosophical differences to boot. third-wavers are even more strongly against running the ball than the FO community is, they're much more in favor of the deep ball as the primary mode of offense, and they're huge fans of the Sam Hinkie tanking approach. if any of you have seen Tanier argue about Hinkie or Sashi Brown on Twitter, these are the people he's fighting with. so even though FO & RotoUnderworld are ostensibly in the same line of work, they're really two different worlds.

there's a lot more i could say but this post is long enough for now...

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